More Disruptive Technology Start-Ups, Please

February 20, 2009

Next NY’s “Jumpstarting Sales in Your Startup” panel last night featured Mark LaRosa of QuotaCrush and Jeff Stewart of Urgent Career. Though the group was lively to begin with, the question that generated the most buzz - "What are the best ways to get past a gatekeeper?" - was such a classic that I had to post the best responses.

Here’s the best of the best that came out of the crowd last night:

Give the gatekeeper the benefit of the doubt. Most salespeople assume that an assistant doesn’t have the time, judgment, or influence to help them, and therefore ask immediately for the decision-maker. Huge mistake! Treat every assistant with the courtesy and respect of a CEO. Doors will magically open for you.

Treat the assistant like a human being. This is obvious, but most assistants don’t aspire to be assistants forever. Google their name. See if they blog or tweet. What’s their web presence? Find something that they are genuinely interested in and run with it.

Use your arsenal. Make a joke. Play good cop/bad cop. Talk about the weather. Mention a tidbit you saw in the news. Ask about their company’s latest release. Ask if they’re running the company yet. Whatever your style, get the assistant on your side. After all, they’re controlling your access to the company. There’s no need to make them enemy #1.

Write down the assistant’s name. Refer to them by name, every time. Be friendly, polite, and direct. Remember that you are not yet their highest priority, and being impatient, self-righteous, and vague is never going to get you there.

Be honest and forthright about your solution. Value the assistant’s time - it’s just as important as the decision maker’s. Explain to them up front what you are calling about and why you think it will add value. Don’t hang up and try again if your target is unavailable – it’s disruptive and dismissive. Worse, you’ve wasted an opportunity.

Ask for help. The more you can engage the gatekeeper in the process, the better. Ask the assistant about the best time to call, the easiest way to get in touch, direct numbers, cell phone numbers, etc. Ask if it’s better to leave a voicemail, leave a message, or just to call back. But before you do that…

Assume the assistant is a decision maker. Believe it or not, the assistant’s job isn’t to keep you at bay. Rather, their job is to discern potential value for their executive and/or their company. By that logic, you should involve the assistant’s judgment as much as possible. Gatekeepers have an ear to the ground about every aspect of the business. Ask them about their pain points. Where would they see the most value added? What’s most important this quarter? Next quarter? Next year? What’s their growth strategy and what are their bottlenecks? What’s their biggest frustration? Assistants offer unique insights that can help you refine your pitch.

Ask who else is involved. Gatekeepers have the ear of everyone that will be involved in your sale. They know who you should be talking to. Ask if you are targeting the right person. Do they know anyone that might be of assistance? Who should you talk to first and why? Who is the ultimate decision maker? Let the assistant paint the relationship structure for you and guide you up the ladder.

Alleviate their burden. Assistants are responsible for sourcing and evaluating vendors. If you’ve called them at the right time, you’ve eliminated their legwork. Let them be responsible for walking your sale through the company. Don’t blow it by presuming that they won’t be involved in the process.

Let the gatekeeper advocate. If you’ve effectively engaged the gatekeeper, they will be your advocate throughout the entire sales cycle. Let them make introductions on your behalf. Ask about the best ways to engage various decision makers. Ask their opinion on what’s most important to each decision maker. Use them as a strategic sounding board as your deal goes through the pipe. The more they are engaged in the value, the more value they add to you.

Got any more of your own? We’d love to hear them in the comments.

About the Guest Blogger: Lauren Gilchrist is Urgent Career's "Jill of All Trades," managing operations ranging from finance to marketing to strategy and beyond. A young entrepreneur interested in the intersection of sales and technology, Lauren plans to contribute regularly to Urgent Career's growing web presence as an authority on all things sales. Look for more of Lauren in the coming weeks.

October 25, 2008

After years of talking to start-ups and fellow seed stage investors, I have noticed that the smart ones understand that in a startup environment, the selling process doubles as a research and development process. In my mind, learning how to sell a new product is one of the defining differences between a technology startup and an established business.

Great startups not only invent a new product, but also invent a way to sell that specifically benefits their product or service. As Geoffrey Moore points out, most great startups are innovative when it comes to their products and when it comes to how they market.

I would add that startups can benefit by implementing the same steps for a new sales process as they would for a r&d process.

How do I propose you find the overlap?

Like product R&D, don’t invest too much too quickly. Innovation is an iterative process. Be sure to budget for the time to experiment.

Like product R&D, don’t put all you eggs in one basket. You will likely need to experiment with pitching to different market segments, different occupations, and different demographics. Staff accordingly

Be ready to commercialize, but don’t commercialize prematurely. Once you think you have a grasp of your target market and resonating value proposition, scale the sales team.

Many engineers I talk to have the misguided “if we build it, they will come,” approach to sales. To this I say: Bull. In 1999, I had the chance pleasure of meeting most of the Google sales team in a hotel bar. Let me tell you, they weren’t talking about algorithms. While the PHDs at Google deserve a lot of credit for building a great product, we can’t forget that the innovations of the sales team developed for the company. They are very responsible for getting Google to where it is today.

"Discovering" how to sell your product is as important as coding your software. No one likes to hear "no i won't buy from your company" any more than they like to that their code won't compile, but both are important vital parts of the development process.

July 15, 2008

Stu Phillips had an interesting post on Ramping sales in a start-up. This may be the best post I have read since Ed Sim talked about sales boulders.

Some of Stu’s beliefs are:

+ Hire a set of experienced sales executives who are good at breaking into new markets.

+ These folks cope well with a missionary sell and are adept at helping the company match the product/service to what the prospect needs.

+ Even a modest sized sales force will burn through $1.5-2M a year.

+ This gets very painful when the revenue ramps slowly (it always ramps slower than you want!).

+ Building a direct sales force is also harder and more expensive than it was in the past.

+ It's very hard to find young, up-and-coming sales people in their late 20's or early 30's, Because the classic training grounds for those kinds of people were IBM, HP, Cisco etc. who have all become primarily distribution sales models.

+ As a result, you find sales people who have been doing the same job for a long time. They don't do well with missionary sales and many just aren't that hungry.

I agree with Stu’s idea that “The most challenging phase in the life of an early company is ramping sales. It's the time where the rubber meets the road”

July 08, 2008

So today we announced what we have been working on for the last 6 months: Urgent Career. Our team is attempting to pioneer the use of linguistic technology to match sales professionals with compatible career opportunities. Basically, we record and transcribe a phone call in which a candidate discusses his or her interests, experience and aspirations. Then our technology digitally deconstructs the conversation into thousands of data points that are algorithmically measured on 32 key dimensions of sales compatibility.

The business model is simple: the service is free to Sales, Business Development and Account Management Professionals; corporate clients pay 20% of the base for each hire. I wanted to make sure the service was performance based, because I wanted the decision to be a no-brainier for CEOs and Sales Managers. That way we can get the best companies in the system, and concentrate our efforts on finding great sales talent. We still have a ton of work to do, but I am proud to say, many of companies that participated in our Alpha release have already hired candidates we identified.

July 06, 2008

Most Managers and Investors understand the importance of having a great technology team, killer product, hot market and solid margins, but again and again I am amazed and how scaling the sales force never seems to be a top priority.

The best kept secret in business is simple:

More sales people usually sell more

Turns out, there is a strong correlation between the number of people making sales calls and the amount of business won.

This simple fact is often overlooked in growth stage companies because:

- Early in a company’s life, it is often unclear exactly what kind of sales person will be most effective, so there is a tendency to delay (retard) growth in hopes that an understanding will magically happen.

- New Sales hires burn valuable cash as they take time to learn the product and/or value proposition

- Statistically some sales hires will fail to carry their own weight, further burning precious cash

- New hires drain precious management time as they try to learn the ropes

- Early stage growth companies typically don’t yet have extensive sales support infrastructure, so new hires today will likely not ramp as quickly as new hires next year, so there is a tenancy to delay.

These are all valuable considerations --- but that does not change the fact that:

More sales people usually sell more!

It's the destiny of math. Five sales people calling on ten of the Fortune 50 will always beat one sales person calling on all 50. For larger markets, 10 sales people calling on 250 accounts each a week will almost always out-perform 5 salespeople. Think about it: are you more likely to get a sale if you talk to 2,500 prospects or 1,259?

My Philosophy is simple: Expanding the sales force is always a urgent priority.

Please don’t delay the revenue, market share, and most important, learning, that will eventually come from a larger sales team.

But a word of caution….. It is very, very hard to grow a sales team by more than 100%. Doubling the team can maintain the culture, but more than that at a given time and you risk completely changing the culture of the company.

July 06, 2007

I am confused… or maybe I found another proof point that there is too much money chasing too few good deals. I noticed in yesterdays VentureWire that Right90 raised a $12 million Series B financing in a round lead by InterWest Partners.

At first glance this makes perfect sense; Right90 is focused on real-time sales forecasting via a SaaS model. Right90’s web site claims:

“Right90 extends your CRM investment by providing insight into your sales forecasts, so you can make your number, maximize your compensation and increase your sales productivity. Right90 combines an intuitive interface, deep analytics and a flexible on-demand platform, so sales reps and executives can get a more accurate and real-time view of their sales performance.”

Sounds great! I wish them luck, and want them to succeed. Anyone who has ever had to make the quarter, or manage a large sales force can attest to the criticality of this business process. Sales executives are easy to find and very sympathetic buyers, thus potential investors can check the “addressable market” box. CEOs and CFOs also have a strong financial interest in getting the numbers right, so I am sure that can’t hurt their revenue potential.

So why don’t I like this deal?… (not that I was asked); To me this smells like a salesforce.com feature, not a stand alone business.

Salesforce is a great service. In 2000 we had a bakeoff between Salesforce and Siebel, at Mimeo.com and the ready to use Salesforce service blew the doors off Siebel’s 6 month to deploy, $160,000 solution. Salesforce convinced me of the inherent benefits of SaaS models for
everyone involved. Salesforce keeps adding customers, and keeps
adding features. I believe sooner or later they will add Right90
functionality, so why would Right90 ever be worth more than Salesforces
cost to build the functionality? Maybe Right90 is getting traction
outside the Salesforce customer base?

I can see why InterWest would be attracted to this problem-space. I am sure they invested much more time thinking about Right90 than I have. According to thefunded.com, InterWest is savvy, so I must be missing something?

Can someone explain why Right90’s upside is not capped by a dependency on Salesforce?

December 08, 2006

This week I saw Brent Halliburton demo Cogmap at the NY Tech Meetup. Brent has built a wiki for corporate organization charts. I wish him luck. Over the years, I have wasted months trying to figure-out who to sell to (or partner with) in large corporations.

Wasting time trying to figure out who to deal with in a large corporation can kill a start-up!

In the early days of Mimeo.com, it took months to find the right contacts at HP, despite the fact that they had already invested millions of dollars in our company.

There is an obvious need for accurate organizational charts for Entrepreneurs, Recruiters, Sales and Business Development professionals. Surprisingly, the need for this information inside big companies themselves.

It is not uncommon for senior level executives to disagree or even have no idea how their company is organized. I guess not all executives are political animals, but it seems to me an executive trying to build a career would want to understand the lay of the land.

At Microsoft, IBM and UPS I "discovered" entire buildings unknown to most of the organization. But this problem is not new; my grandfather told me in
the 1950s there was a 12 person team at RCA that collected checks for a
year before anyone realized they were lost in a reorganization.

Cogmap will face all the same quality challenges that any wiki face, but if they can get it working it seems like the perfect complement to Zoominfo (API anyone?)

I hope Cogmap works; then maybe Entrepreneurs can better target the right person in large corporations, and corporate executives can spend less time listening to ill targeted pitches.

October 23, 2006

This weekend the NY Times pointed out Silicon Valley’s strength as an engine for innovation, but they missed the trend in their own back yard! NY has become the place to start new companies.

For the past 35 years, Silicon Valley has had the greatest ecosystem for startups due to the talent pool and technology community. But New York has one huge advantage over the Valley: access to customers. This advantage is growing in importance to the point where Silicon Valley is losing its startup preeminence.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Silicon Valley. I have enormous respect for the technical talent and business acumen of its inhabitants. There is no place like the Valley with its healthy attitude towards risk and love of technology. And, like New York, the Valley has the critical mass of universities, labs, and early-stage investors. But one of the Valley's big advantages, access to technology, is being eroded by globalization and the Internet.

Back in the days when Intel was a startup, simply knowing great engineers and being able to visit them was a huge advantage. Today, technology breakthroughs can occur anywhere in the world and, thanks to the Internet, Google, and social networking, entrepreneurs can find those technologies and talent fairly easily. Once entrepreneurs and technologists find each other, collaboration is easy thanks to “flat earth” technologies such as Skype and WebEx.

Tons of innovative technologies have been created over the last five years, but the business models have not caught up to the technologies.

Sales, not access to technology (or capital), have become the limiting factor for startup success.

Technical collaboration via Skype is great, but it’s inadequate for missionary sales. When it comes to sales, location matters.

The biggest challenge now for startups is finding customers. This is why New York is my favorite place to start business: lots of customers, lots of industries and lots of media to spread the word.

Selling to large corporations? New York is ideal. According to Hoover's, the New York City Metro area has ~150 companies or divisions with over $1 billion in revenue. That's more than any region in North America, possibly the world. Furthermore, many of these companies can be visited quickly, in rapid succession with the price of a metro card. (Route 101 is great, but try having a meeting on Sand Hill Road, then in San Francisco, then back to San Jose… say hello to hours of traffic!)

Selling internationally? Utah may have a high density of international language speakers thanks to the missionary work of the Mormon Church, but New York has actual international citizens! No matter what region your startup is trying to access (or understand), an entrepreneur can easily find expertise in New York City.

Not yet sure what industry you're going to sell to? No problem! New York is a capital for fashion, publishing, media, telecom, advertising, capital markets and pharmaceutical.

(If you’re selling to government, you might be better off in Vienna, Virginia: but if you can succeed as a startup selling to government, you are achieving something that has eluded me and many other entrepreneurs.)

Want to market to Consumers? The city's dense population, (I mean close packed, not dimwitted) combined with a high concentration of media outlets means word spreads quickly.

What about talent? I firmly believe that recruiting is the keystone of startup success. New York has all manner of expertise, a deep talent base, plus top talent is willing to move to NYC.

What about technical talent? Actually, New York has a very deep technical base; the only problem is much of his talent is absorbed by Wall Street. This means startups need to be pretty impressive if they plan to pull talent from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, but great entrepreneurs can do it.

The deep talent pool of Wall Street also acts as a breeding pool for startups. For example, del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter came from Morgan Stanley. However, I must admit that trying to compare Morgan Stanley to HP as an entrepreneurial breeding ground would be embarrassing!

I’m currently on a flight from New York to the Valley. I wanted to write this post before I fall back in love with the Valley and forget why I am glad to be based in New York.

I like the startup ecosystem of the Valley, but and its target-rich selling fields.

October 15, 2006

Over the last two years as part of the Monitor110 management team, I have visited dozens of labs looking for technologies that could be applied to the intense real-time information needs of Wall Street.

Finding new technology relevant to Wall Street was easy because:

Post 9/11, the government is funding everything related to signal intercept technology and it turns out dealing with Al Qaeda cell phone transcripts is very similar to processing massive amounts of semi-structured web content

The field of artificial intelligence, linguistic processing, genetic algorithms and machine learning are being transformed due to recent price-performance breakthroughs in storage, processing and memory.

The military has moved to a network-centric combat posture and is funding any research related to information overload and human-information interfaces. Information overload is a critical issue for Wall Street analysts, portfolio managers and traders.

Google has made semi-structured data “sexy”, resulting in hundreds of academics focusing on the many challenges of dealing with massive text datasets.

The rapid pace of technological innovation means lots of commercialization opportunities for entrepreneurs; the bad news is most labs are really bad at commercialization.

As an entrepreneur I was struck at how backwards the technology commercialization process is. Typically a university, government or corporate lab will invent something and then have a person responsible for finding a licensee, who then seeks to find a commercial market. Almost every lab, seem to be pushing what they had as opposed to helping us find what we need.

But a handful of labs “get it” and use a very different technique. These labs that “get it” paid careful attention to our needs, and then leveraged their expertise to help us find what we needed, regardless of who invented it. This is called consultative selling.

Over time I believe these labs will become super nodes, epicenters of technology transfer. Businesses with real world problems will learn that these labs can really help. Even though the lab staff may not be able to direct every opportunity to their lab they will achieve an intimacy with the business that should yield valuable long-term relationships.